Just What the Doctor Ordered

TVNZ 1 has changed its prescription for launching series two of Doctor Foster.

Originally, the network was going to repeat series one 9.35 Sundays from October 1 but now it’s opted to screen only the season finale in this slot.

If you missed the series when it first aired, it can be viewed as a box set from midday tomorrow on tvnz.co.nz, where it will be available for a year.

Series two went to air on September 6 in the UK. Said The Guardian:

The joy of the second series of Doctor Foster is that we now know it is not aiming for gritty drama and failing, but aiming for histrionic melodrama and succeeding beyond its wildest expectation. An hour of the five in and I’ve already had so much fun I can barely type.

Concurred The Daily Telegraph:

You don’t always want realism and Doctor Foster(BBC One) – Mike Bartlett’s sublime relationship drama – seems far removed from the real world. I have friends who dislike it for that reason, and yet it also has an ugly truth that I find highly addictive.

Doctor Foster shows, above all, our capacity for emotional cruelty and the start of the second series brought out the ugly side of GP Gemma Foster (Suranne Jones), as her cheating ex-husband Simon (Bertie Carvel) returned to their commuter-belt town with his new, younger second wife.

Marvelled The Times:

There’s a deceptive skill going on here, in the look— the shifting colour palettes between Gemma’s home and Simon’s modernist mansion — and the apparent ease with which the writer, Mike Bartlett, has drawn us back into the milieu of sex and mind games, red bras and lethal blades, his great trick being to make you forget that a second series was barely necessary.

It’s not clear where TVNZ 1 will air series two. The original was stripped as a new-season stunt in early 2016 but more likely is 8.30 Thursdays, as the replacement for Dear Murderer, which ends on October 5.